The new millennium kicked off in video games with the year that seen the N64 and PS1 begin to shift off the stage as a new generation of consoles began to emerge. The excitement for the generational shift was huge, but there were still a lot of great games in the outgoing consoles, and the PC had some absolute classics release this year.
Here are my favourite games of 2000.
My first dip into the Total War series, and one that quickly made me fall in love with it. The base building of Starcraft was gone, and instead you are tasked to manage a strategy map of provinces and settlements while fighting huge battles for control of feudal Japan.
The attention to detail, from the agents mechanics and cutscenes to decisions around religion and accessing guns, the unit variety among the clans, wrestling your way to victory in tight battles against rivals and level of reward when you achieve a campaign victory. Shogun was an incredible experience that broadened my expectations of what a strategy game could be.
I had long been a much bigger fan of JRPG's like Final Fantasy than their western counterparts, but Baldur's Gate genuinely challenged that by providing a completely different style of RPG in a masterful way.
Set in the DnD universe, Shadows of Amn felt like a completely realised fantasy setting with well presented characters, rich lore, a good story and incredibly rewarding game mechanics and party development.
It is such an incredible step up over the first game in the series and is a towering achievement that isometric role-playing games today still falter in meeting.
Spyro 2 had been a significant improvement on the foundations of the first game, and Spyro 3 largely did the same on its predecessor. While not quite the same step forward, it made significant improvements in many areas.
Completely filled with the charm and sense of adventure that the series was known for at this stage, Year of the Dragon became the pinnacle of this style of platformer. With new playable characters, more worlds, a fleshed out story and the most smooth gameplay of the series, this was a hugely impressive game and one of the best PS1 experiences I had.
More characters, more fleshed out story and all the best gameplay of the series made for a game that remains better than anything Spyro related that came after, Skylanders be damned. They don't make them like this anymore.
In what felt like a year of great RPG's, Deus Ex stood out as something unique. In terms of atmosphere it felt very akin to Perfect Dark's Bladerunner-inspired world, but came at it from a completely different direction.
Instead of focusing on the shooting and combat mechanics, Deus Ex was about decisions, character development and giving the player choices in how to approach any given situation. It's story is gripping, the gameplay addictive and the campaign so replayable. The sheer amount of choice it has for the player puts most modern RPG's to shame, and this is a true classic.
A spiritual successor to GoldenEye and one that had the gameplay to live up to that legacy. It was so refreshing to see Rare not just do another Bond game but instead create their own franchise, and with a female protagonist leading the charge.
It does attempt to have a story and despite the effort put into this, it is pretty laughable. However, what does stand up is the atmosphere of its technology dominated, almost Bladerunner like world.
The gameplay is fast, responsive and has a lot to master. The difficulty levels make the game feel like a new experience, adding objectives instead of just making enemies tougher, and like GoldenEye is a model of how difficulty could work for games when the effort is invested to make it happen. A fantastic shooter to see the N64 out.
Any follow-up to Ocarina of Time had a huge amount to live up to, and Majora's Mask was not only a follow up but essentially a direct sequel. When I first played it I was disappointed, it is so jarringly different from the structure of its predecessor while using the same assets.
However, it is defiance of the expectations set by Ocarina that makes this one a very special game. With a much darker tone and a world that feels like a recurring and unending nightmare, this was a direction that I would never have expected Nintendo to take the series. It twists the players expectations much the way it twists the world Link inhabits and creates one of the most unique experiences in the series. Yes, it lacks the same scale of ambition or impact that Ocarina had, and I still feel that the progression path through the game is difficult and filled with unnecessary obstacles, but this is still a fascinating entry in the Zelda series.
My first PS2 game and one that blew me away with its visuals (compared to the PS1) at the time. Set in China and putting the player into what felt like huge battles, riding horses and with a large roster of characters, I pretty much instantly fell in love with Dynasty Warriors after playing this game on Christmas Day.
The player feels like a war god, smashing scores and scores of enemies aside and defeating boss characters across sprawling maps. While it was very much a rinse and repeat gameplay experience, it made an impact at the time, and most importantly was hugely fun.
Pokemon Stadium took the extremely popular franchise from the handheld to the tv screen and allowed players to battle it out in what felt like huge arenas and very high scale matches. It also had a very fun series of mini-games and challenges for multiplayer games, and overall was a very surprisingly strong package.
Perhaps its greatest asset was that it allowed players to connect their gameboy pokemon game to it, upload their team to it and battle against enemies. It also allowed players to actually play the gameboy game on the larger screen, and at faster speeds if they wished. It was an extremely impressive technical feat for the time.
I only got to play this one yeas later on the Xbox Live Arcade, but it is an impressive fighter. With fast and responsive combat that demands precise control and with a substantially different mechanical approach to Street Fighter 2.
It is a real pity that so many of the great cast from the previous Street Fighter games were missing here, and the new characters are just not as interesting. Despite this, the core foundation of Street Fighter is strong enough to carry this one and the gorgeous visual style was captivating to watch.
Dark, gothic and addictive are all words that do well in describing the experience of Diablo 2. It was my first time playing a game so focused on loot collection, but it was wrapped in the trappings of a terrible fantasy world filled with demons and dark entities.
I did feel that while the gameplay was deep and involving, the lore and story was relatively straightforward and fell down in comparison to something like Baldur's Gate. A fascinating PC experience all the same, and a game that would make a big impact on the industry.
