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MikkaQ

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Best games of the past 18 years.

To celebrate having turned 18, I'm going to pick my favourite game from every year since 1991.
Keep in mind these are MY PERSONAL favourites of the year, not necessarily the best or the most beloved, but just games I REALLY loved at the time. Also keep in mind, every game up to 1996 or so I probably played AFTER 1996, seeing as that's kinda when I got into games, and I mean... can you see a 2 month old baby play Street Fighter II? Yeah didn't think so.
 
 
LET'S GET TO IT!

List items

  • 1991: The combo system invented (accidentally).

    Street Fighter II changed the landscape of fighting games for freaking ever with it's crazy cast of colorful characters, unique fighting moves for each character, and the accidental invention of the combo system, which is now absolutely key to all the fighting games made since.

    But who cares about that, I liked it because I could beat the shit outta cars, sumo wreslters, army dudes, all kinda craziness. To a kid, that was madness. Never seen anything like it when I started getting into it.

  • 1992: Man this was a tough choice. Between Sonic 2, Kirby, Mortal Kombat and Wolfenstein, I was pretty stumped. Then I remember this little gem.

    I was a huge gameboy fan when I was a kid, they were my main platform for a long time. Portable games blew my mind, and probably explains why I'm really tolerant of 8-bit games these days. I grew up with similar games!

    Though I never owned this game, I played it a lot with friends, and I loved going back to that level where you float around in a bubble getting coins. Or the crazy clockwork Mario stuff. Many aspects of this game were awesome, and it has some of my favourite 2D mario levels ever.

    Plus, it introduced Wario, whose Warioland games and Warioware games I've been enjoying for years now.

  • 1993: These choices keep getting tougher and tougher with Myst, Doom, Secret of Mana, and all kinds of great classics.

    But I have to give it to Kirby's Adventure. The prettiest looking NES game I've ever seen, with vivid-colors, great environments, and a cheery disposition.

    The gameplay was great too. I hesitated to include Kirby's first outing, on the Game Boy, because I knew this was so much better. They added his legendary copy abilities power, and instantly, a somewhat fun, albeit too simple platformer becomes a crazy, fun, and interesting gaming experience that I feel still holds up today. I know MY kids will be raised on this stuff to be certain. Fuck the Holotron-3000™, NES Kirby action is all a toddler needs.

  • 1994: Hoo-boy, now it gets interesting. In one year, we get Doom II, Marathon, Final Fantasy 3 (or 6 or whatever), Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, and more. What a great year filled with classics. I had to go with Doom II however, because I liked it's simpler, tighter, more action focused gameplay than Marathon, I haven't beat FF3, and the SNES was never my scene (though Super Metroid almost made it).

    Doom II was absolutely awesome when I played it, and that was probably when all the newfangled FPS games with graphics and stories started coming about (Half-Life, anyone?). It had frantic, fast-paced, action that basically never let go from second one. Plus it had a super shotgun, which totally helped make that game for me. The simple, but fun action combined with awesome enemy design makes this an unforgettable game for me. I still go back to it every time I buy a new computer, or other strange platform it's been ported to a million times over.

  • 1995: Another toughie, but it ultimately came down to what I played the most. Calling Full Throttle a fave would be a dirty lie. Yes I love that game, but did I even REALLY get into it? No. I didn't play it that much. Same with Earthbound, another game I appreciate, but from a distance.

    Tacking an old RPG is just something I never have time for, but Chrono Trigger is one I did for some reason. And I'd recommend it to others as well. If I had to pick a game that sums up all the greater aspects of the 16-bit era RPGs, (as flawed as I find 'em), this game would be it. It had an engaging story, somewhat less clichéd than it's contemporaries, the ATB system was a nice fit for the game, and I really liked how scripted events smoothly transitioned into battle. The whole crazy transitions and "whoosh" effects into battles that most RGPs have throw me right off, and I lose touch with the game a bit. This game was also pretty long, and kept me engaged most of the way through. It's a great end-all JPRG for me. Freezes the era perfectly.

  • 1996: Aah the N64 came out, and with that, my first console to call my own. I was pretty happy at the time, I didn't even REALLY know what a console was, for me gaming was a matter of PCs. And.. edutainment. Well thanks dad for actually showing me some games. Soon to be his biggest regret, and my new favourite toy, the N64 was awesome. And it had Super Mario 64 when it came out, you bet I was playing that x-mas day, all day.

    Super Mario 64 is really the most memorable for me, because it was my first console game, and ostensibly, my first REAL game. Me and my father spend like 15 minutes trying to find the Z butter in order to crouch jump. Just a lot of good memories from this one. I especially liked the music and the crazy ADD feeling to the level design. Certainly helps a 5 year old get into games.

  • 1997: This was basically between this game, GoldenEye, and Mario Kart 64 but I didn't even play a lot of Goldeneye at the time, and even if I did, I had waaay more fun with game, I think. Compared to Mario Kart, this one gives me the warm-fuzzies a little more. I also played a lot of FF7, despite it's status now as one of my least favourite FF games (I found out about the SNES ones afterwards, so yeah).

    Diddy Kong Racing had some good-ass hectic multiplayer, the style of which I still enjoy to this day. The track design was insane, and the multivehicle concept was totally new and fun at the time for me. Throw in some crazy powerups and attacks, and you got yerself an addictive little racer. Plus it debuted everyone's favorite foul-mouthed squirrel, back when Rare was prepping him up to be a full kid's franchise (I still have his pussy-ass gameboy game somewhere).

  • 1998: Yeah, I know what you're thinking. "Hey asshole, pick Half-Life" or "Where the Metal Gear LOVE?!"

    Well.. basically I played none of those in 1998. I was 7 or something. When I saw Half-Life's headcrabs, I got nightmares, and I wouldn't have had the patience for the awesome plot of MGS (as much as I love it now).

    Surprisingly, I DID have the patience for that addictive fucking RPG Pokemon. It was a cool game for me, because it was a classic style RPG, with a few key twists, like being able to pick your party members from a pool of 150. That was very awesome. Trading and battling friends in the schoolyard, collecting badges, and the general pokemania that I got caught up in, makes this a very personal choice for my favourite game of 1998.

  • 1999: Awww hell yeah. This has gotta hold my personal record for most rentals. I think I rented this about 5 times in 1999 (well back before 5 rentals cost MORE than a full game). There isn't much for me to say about the game, most people know everything about this game. But it was such a fun game, really addictive and great multiplayer. Perhaps not the most advanced, or balanced fighting game, but definitely one of the craziest. And that's what I look for in a fighting game.

  • 2000: Yeah I know I have another Chrono game here, but to be honest they're probably the only JRPG of real worth to me. They're tons o' fun and the plots don't seem to get too cheesy like most others.

    It was between this game and The Sims. I probably spent more time with The Sims, and to be honest, I dunno why. It's just a weird little guilty pleasure.

    Chrono Cross had some fun combat, an interesting setting, and probably the biggest cast I've seen in a JRPG. I mean seriously, it had like 40 characters you could acquire, and it gave good incentive to play the game differently each time, because some choices lock out other party members. Plus, messing with different dimensions was a pretty neat concept for the time.

  • 2001: Yeah, yeah. I know what you're saying. It's true, this was a predictable-ass choice, but most people forget that there was a reason this was predictable. For it's time, Halo was awesome. I never played a lot of PC games past Quake 2 at this point, so most of my shooter experience came from my N64, Golden Eye, and Perfect Dark.

    Forget evolution, this was a total revolution for me. I was blown away by the Xbox's visual prowess (even though it looks bland in hindsight), the controls were super sharp and amazingly mapped, and for the first time I played a shooter with an engaging storyline. I also wouldn't want to sell all the fun and chaos the multiplayer offered short.

    There were a lot of runner ups for this one, like Paper Mario, Smash Bros Melee, and GTA III, but this one won me over because it really kicked off that generation of games for me. Shit was REAL.

  • 2002: This was the first time I had a PC capable of gaming, and boy was it a blast. I played so much Battlefield, No One Lives Forever 2, and Soldier of Fortune 2 at the time, but nothing was as much a time vacuum as Morrowind.

    The visuals tore a hole straight through my head, everything was so detailed from the water effects to the facial animation, I had never seen anything that awesome at the time. The immersion was also incredible, I felt like, for the first time, truly immersed in the game world, as opposed to just being the disconnected player. The combat really wasn't great, but everything surrounding it was so much fun I forgave it readily.

    This was also the first game I modded out till it was barely recognizable. I downloaded tons of stupid crap, like 2, guns, wierd clothing and houses, but it merely ensured I would come back to it constantly till probably when Oblivion dropped.

  • 2003: This year was pretty action packed, with Rayman 3, Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire, F-Zero GX, Soul Calibur 2, and the first Call of Duty. So why did I pick this weird little French Zelda clone? And in the year Windwaker came out? Blashphemy!

    I'll tell you why: This game made me actually enjoy the 3D Zelda formula, in a way the 3D Zelda games had failed to do up to that point. It varied the gameplay enough, between the fun hovercraft elements, the combat, the stealth and the puzzles to keep things fresh all the time, and it never lingered on one element too long. That was key.

    That great balance of gameplay elements, the great voice acting, and engaging world and story line made this game a modern classic of sorts. I feel like it still stands out today and being one of the better entries in the action-adventure genre, and I couldn't be more excited for the sequel. Let's just not fail 'em this time, okay?

  • 2004: Listen, I don't care that this was the year of Halo 2, Half-Life 2, the (at the time) novel Katamari Damacy, Doom 3, Fable, San Andreas, or the hilarious Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door. This was the year of fucking Burnout.

    The series had never made a particularly large impact on me up to this point, it barely surfaced on my radar, and I was about to ignore this one just as much as the first two. But then I played the demo. Everything changed, this was the fastest racing game I played at the time, running at an extremely smooth frame rate, and the sense of speed provided combined to make one amazing racer.

    Except I didn't even talk about the crashes! My god, they were amazing, such details in the wrecking of these beautifully rendered cars, I couldn't believe it myself. It was so fun to run people off the road, and see how many you could knock out before being eliminated yourself. Plus the crash mode, which completely tweaked the racer into some interesting puzzle game. There were so many different levels to this game, and I got caught in some kind of crash frenzy. Racing was never the same.

  • 2005: Although this was the Xbox 360's launch year, I didn't have one till later. The launch games were also pretty underwhelming in my opinion. Really, for me, this year was between Battlefield 2 and Psychonauts. I don't think I wanted people to think I was some kind of bleeding heart for those critical darlings that fail in sales, and I didn't want to write the same entry as BG&E twice, so I'm going with this little number.

    Battlefield 2 should go up there in the pantheon of most improved sequels in gaming. They took everything that was awesome about Battlefield 1942, and focused it into a tighter, more cohesive package, whilst adding tons of new and innovative features that took games another couple years to catch up. This was the original shooter that had persistent character and weapon unlocks, and really popularized the concept of ranking, levelling up and points in a shooter. The weapons felt great, the true medic class was born, and the sense of scale in the maps was amazing. The fact that I played this game for another 4 or more years since it's release just goes to show how ahead of it's time it was. Just wish it was widescreen.

  • 2006: FUCK YEAH! Sonic's back baby! The king of platfor-

    Haha gotcha. No. This game is bad.

  • 2006: Okay I didn't want to put down two Elder Scrolls games here, but I really felt like I had to. 2006 wasn't as great as most of the years past. Sure, the Wii launched, and Wii Sports was kinda exciting, and yes the PS3 launched with... stuff, but really it was this game that was the biggest time sink for me.

    A pretty vast improvement over Morrowind, with a few snags along the way, Oblivion fell in the terrible, terrible space between attempting to attract new audiences into the series, and keeping it's personality and complexity that the super RPG Elder Scrolls nerds demanded. And boy, did it fall awkwardly.

    The combat was so much better than the last game, combined with a revolutionary physics model and a supposedly revolutionary AI model, this game was pretty groundbreaking for it's time. At at the same time, it managed to take a really crazy and original world, and render it somewhat generic. The central province of the game's world was the closest thing the series had to a standard medieval world, and picking it as a setting kinda seemed like a dull move to me. Morrowind had the opportunity for the artists to flex their skill and create alien worlds with freaky architecture. To me, this felt a bit diluted in that sense.

    But this game was still great enough to suck a great deal of time out of my life, and make it on this list.

  • 2007: This was the year I picked up a "next gen" (guess it's pretty current now) console. I got me an Xbox 360, and this game came out a week or so after I got it.

    Boy, was it a good introduction to this generation, amazing visual style, some of my favorite sound design ever, and technically superior graphics to whatever I had played at the time. This was the future of games for me. I had never seen a game with a better sense of atmosphere till perhaps Dead Space.

    Not to mention a much more thoughtful plot for a shooter, which reminded me of the Marathon days on the Mac.

    The gameplay was also quite interesting to me, as you were thrown into levels that you could freely explore, adding some extra depth to things, as well as the game rewarding you for conserving ammo, and killing dudes in interesting ways.

    Plus, the politics of Fontaine and Ryan clashing were just straight up awesome.