Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is obviously top of the pops. Dominated middle school hallway conversations, was an amazing easter egg mine on the IGN GTA forums and that soundtrack opened up a whole new world just as I was beginning to become The Music Guy at my school anyway.
SOCOM: US Navy Seals: Dude. Voice chat. While the second iteration would become one of the most important games of my life and an all-consuming activity (I was in a clan, for Pete's sake!) I was an early evangelist for the series. If I hadn't loved this game as much as I did I might have never convinced everyone to buy SOCOM II the following year and completely destroy our freshman year report cards.
The Getaway: For some reason this didn't appear in two separate listings of 2002 games for PS2 I scrolled through in writing this, but the placement of this game after this edit is important. I loved The Getaway and thought having to lean against a wall to recover health was cool, it made the gunplay feel dangerous because if it went south I'd be wasting time. But was so thankful that at least I wasn't dead. Valuable life lesson. Also: Charlie fuckin' Jolson.
Madden NFL 2003 / NCAA Football 2003: And as part of becoming The Music Guy it meant spending a ton of time playing Madden and listening to music pirated from Kazaa. Also a somewhat awful soundtrack that I nonetheless can still hear every song from in my head with a certain fondness. This also began a peak era for Madden as the NFL 2K series began seriously nipping at its heels after Sega dissolved the Dreamcast and brought it to other platforms. Likewise, NCAA Football was starting to focus on the little things, bringing in school mascots, getting the rights to authentic recordings of nearly every important fight song in football history and seriously expanding on the depth of Dynasty Mode. Online competitive play and importing roster files from NCAA to Madden was just around the corner but 2002 was the year that laid the foundations for one of sports video games' peak eras. 2002 through 2007 was a truly good time to be a football gamer.
Resident Evil: All that ever needs to be said about Nodima in 2002 is that when he wasn't slacking off at school and obsessing over the girl from the Kingdom Hearts anecdote further down this page, he was writing extended rally-style fan fiction about Resident Evil 2 on the IGN Resident Evil forums. This girl was a figure skater and young Nodima hated goths. Yet there he was, being that kind of nerd behind closed doors.
Resident Evil 0: And so...y'know.
Metroid Prime: Whenever I run down my history with the Gamecube, I always forget that I did play this game, I think because I never beat it. But it was very, very cool and scratched a Perfect Dark-esque itch for future sci-fi FPS action.
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault: I've never really been a PC gamer, but there was a brief period in the early 2000s when I convinced my parents to switch over from an Apple house to a PC house...unfortunately, we chose Gateway as the product and Windows XP as the platform, got introduced to the wonderful world of viruses and hardware errors and were back to Apple by the time the flatscreen iMacs dropped. But for a brief time I did have access to the PC, and while Blade Runner will always be the definitive Game I Otherwise Might Not Have Played, I have to admit that there was something immediately special about Stephen Spielberg's Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. This was Peak Band of Brothers (yeah I read Stephen Ambrose's original novel as well!) and this game just had everything going for it...even if I was the anarchist child who'd played Medal of Honor: Underground on Playstation and wished I could just use a Dual Shock instead of a mouse and keyboard.
TimeSplitters 2: This game animated beautifully, had multiple nods to Goldeneye, some really fun guns and a pretty unique atmosphere thanks to all the different time periods. I used to love just about any game that lifted Rare's "mission difficulty isn't so much about how strong your enemies are as it is the difficulty of the tasks we've assigned you" and TimeSplitters 2 is a shining example of the form. What more could you want in 2002?
Medal of Honor: Frontline: Obviously far less memorable than Allied Assault - though there was something about a tank and a bridge, right? - but for its time it still looked incredible, especially running on a PS2. It wasn't constantly crashing and making my console sweat bullets the way Allied Assault was that accursed PC, either, plus I could play it on a controller, so I liked it a lot.
Aggressive Inline: Tony Hawk's 4 didn't hold me long, or at least I don't remember it doing so - I probably played it for hundreds of hours - because the open world was actually kind of a pain to get around. Aggressive Inline came through at just the right time as nostalgia for Disney's Brink was just starting to settle in to a comfortable nook of my brain and all the Tony Hawk you loved without any of the stuff you didn't was right there - plus some cool riffs like tying skater skill to just performing the moves rather than plugging skill points into an attribute meter.
Eternal Darkness: Truly fucked up and novel game that I'm sure, were it to release today, I'd actually find a little pesky and annoying. But I was an eighth grader who watched The Real World, listened to Chevelle and Hoobastank earnestly (remember - I was only becoming The Music Guy) and couldn't form many complete sentences that weren't references to Chappelle's Show or South Park. This game fit right in.
Ratchet & Clank: Pretty, pretty good.
Kingdom Hearts: I can't lie and say I was ever able to ignore how annoying a lot of this game was even as a youth in 2002, but I was a Disney kid and knew all these movies pretty well so it was pretty much a given that I'd fall for this world anyway. Besides, I was also a Final Fantasy VIII kid and previews made it seem like Squall was going to be very important and very cool! First let down: a lame excuse for the developers being ashamed of naming this character Squall a few years back and changing his name to Leon. Second let down: gummi ship, of course. Most important fact: the first girl from my neighborhood that I made out with every day after school while watching Usher videos on MTV was a huge fan of this game, so I was a huge fan of this game.
Onimusha 2: I'll bet this game really sucks now, but in 2002 there was nothing I loved more than forced perspective games from Capcom featuring horror elements and this was damn sure one of those. I'll always stand behind Onimusha 3, though.
WWE Smackdown! Shut Your Mouth: Had a really cool branching path story mode, brought all the WCW heavies into the fold under the still-novel Yukes gameplay system and, well, this was maybe the last year I was a true fan of wrestling? Needless to say, I sunk a lot of time into this.
Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX 2: Hey, it was 2002, the X Games were the most important thing in the world, and I couldn't ride a skateboard worth shit but I sure did ride a BMX bike everywhere I went. What more needs to be said?
Stuntman: Sometimes, you just needed a game to rent when you rolled up to the Hollywood Video on your BMX after Blockbuster was out of stock of every game you actually wanted to play and more often than not, when Hollywood Video inevitably was out of stock too, I'd pull Stuntman off the shelf. Don't question it!
Street Hoops: I might be lying about this one but some synapse in my brain fired off when scrolling past this on Metacritic. It's also an excuse to acknowledge all the games I should've loved but just never rented or did love but have nothing to say about, really, most of which are undoubtedly better than Street Hoops whose most important distinction was likely that it had the actual dudes from the And-1 tapes and NBA Street Vol. 2 hadn't yet released and made all other street basketball representations irrelevant: Gungrave, BMX XXX (remember, 8th grader - strings were pulled!), Suikoden III, Sly Cooper, Burnout 2, Hot Shots Golf 3, Red Faction II, ATV Offroad Fury 2, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Tekken 4, Knockout Kings 2002, Super Mario Sunshine
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