Late at night I often find myself digging out my GameCube and loading up Twilight Princess, or if that is too much of a stretch I plug my GameCube controller into the Wii and play it that way. I find it's like calling up an old friend I haven't seen in a while who always has a story to tell.

I find Link at the crossed waterways above Lake Hylia, surrounded by the crashing sounds of the bloated river and the delicate chiming of insects. It is possibly my favourite location in the game. There are options here; a sedate spot of fishing, a thrilling white-water boatride to the lake itself, or a pathway to the open field and the continuation of the adventure. How ever many times I load the game I never save over it. The date reads 27/01/2007. The day I thought I was finished with the game.

Due to the release of the Wii in early December, the GameCube version was delayed a couple of weeks. My first play-through of the game was therefore on the Wii. It lasted thirty hours, the game unfinished. I spent those thirty hours pining for the GameCube's chunky controller. When the GameCube version was released, I spent another thirty hours retreading the same environments (albeit, mirrored), fighting the same battles, and 're-solving' the same puzzles. Yet, I enjoyed it far more. Whether it was due to the pact I made that Twilight Princess would be the last GameCube game I would play (Wind Waker being the very first) before packing the old fellow up for good. Maybe it was just the infinitely more comfortable GameCube controller. Perhaps it was simply the vague feeling that this was how it was meant to be.

Do you ever feel a strange sadness as dusk falls?

An unshakeable air of sadness permeates the game. The introductory scene sees Link and his stable-mate colleague, Rusl, resting beside a three-tiered watering hole near Ordon Village as the sunlight is fading. The conversation holds a melancholy tone. It seems to delicately invoke the Japanese idea of 'Mono no aware', the sadness of things passing. Rusl explains to Link how the hour of twilight allows the real world to intersect with the spirit world and that the regrets of the dead can be felt by those still living. It's only a short scene, but it colours the entire adventure. Straight away the game feels different, more mature, more grown-up. It has concerns of work, toil, longing and regret.

Although, if pushed, I would have always said that the Wind Waker was my favourite of the two games, it's Twilight Princess which lingers in my mind even now. Wind Waker, for all its charm, doesn't really lend itself to projection. Link is a happy-go-lucky child with the world at his feet and adventure in his heart. Twilight Princess' Link is a young adult who, although well-liked, lives alone, away from the other villagers. In a tree-house at that. He is seemingly troubled. His life is the not the angsty catalyst of a thousand adventures or even the child-like wonder of a world unexplored. It is more a quiet life of order and mundanity. Taking pleasure in the little things. Many have said that Twilight Princess plays like a remake of Ocarina of Time with varying mechanics. A wolf in sheep's clothes, perhaps. However, ever so slowly the differences become apparent. The main important difference being that of the character of Link himself. Shigeru Miyamoto's, Ocarina of Time's, Link is a special boy, a boy with a destiny to be fulfilled. Eiji Aonuma's, Twilight Princess', Link is an ordinary young man, likable, but nothing special. Miyamoto's Link is born into adventure. Aonuma's Link falls into it. As a favour. To someone else. He is asked to deliver a sword to Hyrule town which he uses as the only thing available to defend himself when he is attacked by a horde of goblins. He becomes hero of time by accident.

It turns out Twilight Princess is not really a game about good versus evil. It's about identity, a sense of place and the importance of belonging. Your ultimate goal is to stop the fusion of Hyrule and the Twilight Realm. As such, it's the details that are important: the picture of Epona hanging above Link's bed, the score-lines in the turf the ranch gate has carved over many years of toil, and the instantly recognisable music of Lake Hyrule fading back in as you remove the Iron boots at the entrance to the lake temple on the lakebed and slowly surface. When you finally get to take on Ganondorf it's not in a gigantic Gothic hall, not an abstract temple designed only to house him, it isn't somewhere you've never seen before. It's right there in the middle of Hyrule field. A one-on-one battle for the fate of the very world you are stood in. The trees. The river. The grass. The rocks.

And, for me, it's a battle for running through town before the shops close after a day of working in a job you hate, hoping they still have the GameCube version in stock. The welcoming feel of the GameCube controller and the orange glow of a space heater from playing the game in the dead of winter, two o'clock in the morning and the sound of the wind in the trees outside.

So, Demon's Souls. Demon's Souls. Demon's Souls. Coming out of nowhere to grace gamers' best of year lists despite being released in the US only a couple of months ago and still with no sign of a European release.

You are dumped in the fallen Kingdom of Boletaria, a once powerful city driven to ruin by a power-mad King. Tasked with the retrieval of the Kingdom from the rule of some almighty demons, you set out into hell. It is made clear you are only the next in a long-line of would-be saviours. Previous combatants lay all around the Nexus, dead or dying.

The sense of desperation is palpable.

The atmosphere is relentless, cloying. The first castle feels how you would imagine a medieval castle to feel. It's weighty and imposing. Exactly as it would be. It is a curious feeling in a videogame; realising the environments are not built around you. That the castle is designed to keep you out, to disorient you. It is a functional building. The hallways are labyrinthine, barely the width of a human; they are built for defense, not attack. This makes advancing an effort. You have to think about combat, lure enemies into the relative open to create whatever advantage you can, however small. Becoming surrounded is incredibly dangerous. You will die often. But that is okay. The game expects it, is designed around it, even. One of the central mechanics of the game is the difference between being a 'body' and being a 'soul'. Once you die in a level you return as a 'soul'. As a soul you have slightly less health but your attack power is increased. The currency of the game is souls, received after every kill. Souls can be traded for new weapons and equipment or used to level-up personal attributes. As such, they are important to progress. The counter is right there on the screen. The number growing and growing as you advance deeper.

Therein lies the dread.

Each time you die you leave a bloodstain in the level, marking the spot where you were slain. And with it, every soul you have collected so far. To retrieve the souls, you must return to the same spot and touch your bloodstain. Dying again before reaching the spot means the souls are gone for good. The game becomes about hedging your bets, gambling upon how far you can make it into a stage before losing your nerve and returning to cash in your collected souls, knowing that the next time you will be stronger, better prepared, a little braver even.

Shadows dancing in torchlight, hay scattered about the floor. Hidden alleys simply obscured by the angle of a wall. It is an incredible analogue to the real-world. You can almost touch it, smell it, feel it.

For the past week or so, I have been reading Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a speculative essay concerning the disappearance of human beings from the planet and the routes nature will take to re-establish itself as the primary influence on the topography of the Earth. Weisman suggests that, sooner than we could imagine, the Earth would revert to an entirely green landscape, the immense infrastructure of our cities being undermined and overrun by a combination of water, weather, plant-life and animals. The only thing to betray our existence - a 6 million ton swirling mass of discarded plastic in the North Pacific. Every piece ever made since the 1950's still in existence.

Since I began reading, impermanence haunts my waking hours. As I sleep, imperceptible droplets of water leak between the minute gaps between roof tiles, bloating wooden struts and forming a blackened map of spores in the corners of the bedroom; little by little weakening the entire structure of my house. When I dream, I dream of cracks in plaster, blistering and exposing wounds through which I can see the clearest blue-sky, the same sky that will bear witness to the fall of our buildings, our cities. Us.

In a way I find it reassuring. Geologically speaking, the whole of human history is but a speck within a speck, let alone the life of a single human. Mortgages, jobs, people; everything is transient. The life-cycle of a tree continues year after year, leaves fall, leaves grow, that's all there is. That's all there needs to be. In the same way, buildings are erected, buildings fall. Nothing is important. Everything vanishes.

Except nature.

Nature endures.

I shall keep reading; the future looks interesting, whether anyone is here to see it or not.